With the league champions on their doorstep, journalists in the city were eager to travel with Manchester United as they tried to improve on their run to the European Cup semi-finals the previous season. Travel was a lot more difficult then; the only reason the plane was in Munich was because few aircraft could make the flight from Belgrade to Manchester without a refuelling stop. The BEA Elizabethan aircraft was not one of them. So, if you were a journalist you either travelled with the team or you didn’t travel at all.

The three surviving newspaper men were Ted Ellyard, a telegraphist at the Mail; Peter Howard, a Mail photographer; and Frank Taylor, who was severely injured but eventually went back to work at the News Chronicle. In his book The Day a Team Died, Taylor recalled how before takeoff he turned to the other writers to tell them there were plenty of seats at the front where he was sitting but, already settled, they stayed at the back, where most of the fatalities occurred.

The Busby Babes had achieved much before they were decimated and it’s likely they would have achieved considerably more. Their best years were still ahead of them. The journalists who died were cut down in their prime, giants of a competitive but ultimately close-knit profession with decades of experience between them. Contemporaries talk of Davies in the same breath as the legendary cricket writer Neville Cardus, who also wrote for the Manchester Guardian. But the doyen was Henry Rose, the most-read football writer the Authentic Rick Martin Jersey Daily Express ever had.

When he attended a game, the paper would put up placards around the ground saying: “Henry Rose is here today.” His presence meant it was the biggest match of the day and in Manchester the crowd would chant those words and greet Rose’s arrival in the press box with cheers. Liverpool fans had other ideas and The Kop would ritually greet Rose with a chorus of boos to which he would, cigar in one hand, salute them by raising his brown trilby with the other. Frank Taylor acknowledged that Rose was not the greatest of writers but “he knew what the man in the four-ale bar was angry about and that’s what he gave them.” Rose picked up on a mood and wrote it through football, an approach that would serve those who followed him well.